This past week Florida teachers, and for the first time that I’ve really noticed, teachers from around the world, converged on Orlando for the annual FETC Conference. I’m pleasantly pleased about the experience this year, as always. I had the GREAT honor of meeting Jeff Corwin in person. He was the keynote speaker for this year’s conference, and Discovery brought him in early to have lunch and speak with a few of us in their corporate room at the Convention Center. As soon as I can get the images up on Flickr I will add the link here.

Thursday was spent in panel discussions with one of the vendors off of the exhibit hall floor. It was a new experience for me, I’d never participated in a forum like that before. I felt no remorse about being away from the convention center area for 3 total hours. As I was looking through the conference schedule, the one thing that I noticed the most was the amount of sessions that were a rehash of older ideas, or basic how’to sessions that I really don’t need to go to. So for me, it was a win-win situation.

Friday was a different story. I attended several sessions that I was very pleased about . Digital Booktalks described a different way of doing digital storytelling to get students interested in reading. It involved making book trailers about the books that have been read in class. It forces students to read the book to be able to make the movie. The thing that really didn’t surprise me was when Dr. Perry shared that he saw students who ‘ratted’ out to other students about not really reading the book after watching their trailer. That became the impetus for a conversation to support their argument as to why they thought the other students did not read their book. Students driving their own discussions and education. Is that not what we are here to do.

The other ‘new’ thing to me that I tried on Friday was using/utilizing ustream.tv. As with everything, I’m late getting on the bus with great tools out there to help me learn and to share with my teachers. Steve Dembo and Hall Davidson were gracious enough to let me ustream their presentations. As I’m sitting there streaming out Steve’s, Marie Coleman is streaming Hall’s presentation at the same time from the other end of the convention center. The number of looks I got while sitting there with earbuds in my ear and listening to Steve’s presentation and Hall’s presentation at the same time was priceless. As with all of Steve’s presentations, I usually find one thing that I never knew, or one tool that I can use. This time it’s Jumpcut. I’m going to mess around with it some more before commenting. But first look, it’s pretty nice.

As I close down, I’m sitting here listening to the live panel discussion for Sunday morning at Educon2.0 in Philadelphia. I wonder if there is a place for Huge conferences in a box like FETC and the other state conferences for me? I’m sitting in my garage for the second day in a row running a garage sale and listening and learning and conversing. But more on that later too. I encourage all that have not watched and listened to some of these presentations to check the archive of the presentations on ustream.tv. Well worth it. One of the best quotes I’ve seen so far is from @ijesspederson during one of the sessions. We were talking about Twitter in the channel. Her quote sums it best: “ijesspederson : you are in charge of your own quality control on twitter”. Just food for thought.

Seeking the Wisdom of the Ages…

Tom.

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